: I’m probably the last to see it this morning but in case I’m not and you are… did you see the NY Times editorial this morning lauding the inclusion of bloggers at the Democratic convention… without even the condescension and snarkiness I might have anticipated. The Times laments the old days, long gone, of unpredictable conventions (before politicians were smart enough to manipulate the news by controlling the event):

… All the more reason to hope, then, that this year’s one potentially risky innovation

Or perhaps the bloggers will cover the media’s coverage of the convention from behind the scenes, the quirks and blind spots that the media doesn’t see anymore?

Angelos

But didn’t you hear:
That bloggers get front seats bothers Tom McPhail, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri.
“They’re certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo,” McPhail says. Bloggers “should be put in a different category, like ‘pretend’ journalists.”
Ah, academia. Second only to the Bush Administration in terms of ivory-tower blindness to the real world.

GCW

Does that article miss the difference between having too many applications, and withdrawing some once extended?
“They received applications from 50 bloggers and later announced there was room for only 30. Conspiracy theories are already abounding on the blogs of the disinvited.”

http://www.thestateimin.blogspot.com Brian

I hear you, Simon. Let’s hope we get as many bloggers as we can on the streets of NYC and Boston to provide some nice alternative-coverage of the conventions.

http://www.gringoman.us gringoman

I think Jeff put his finger on the real story here: the NY Times getting a bit bloggy. Recognition, what? Now let’s see what the boggers can do. Ball. Court.

http://www.blogads.com henrycopeland

No, you weren’t the last to see it, I was, cause I read it on your blog. (Even my mother now e-mails that she saw it before me.)
Pretty astonishing that the NYTimes editorialist has the guts to write what is in essence ‘don’t read my colleagues, read the blogs.’
Probably the most astonishing thing I’ve read in my own three years of sipping this Coolaid.

Charlie (Colorado)

If the bloggers liven things up too much, I wonder if they’ll discover their invitations were “issued by mistake” too?

Brian H

“Home for extinct volcanoes”. Ah, how we miss Mencken.
As for “pretend journalists”, considering that journalists rank just one step higher than lawyers on the respected/disrespected profession scale (i.e., almost at the very bottom), maybe “pretend” is far better than real. And maybe it’s just a way of insulting bloggers by saying that they resemble such a degraded class.

Jurgen-Javier

You can’t compare professional journalists to bloggers. Bloggers are unabashedly self-promoting, -aggrandizing, -referring, etc.
BTW, what happened to the Stern crisis? Give up on kissing his ass in the hope that he might throw you a bone by mentioning buzzmachine on the air? Why aren’t you taking up the plight of pooor whoopi and her dethroning as the diet drink diva?

http://twistedspinster.com/ Andrea Harris

Gee, Jurgen-Javier, you sound a bit jealous. You know, you can get a blog of your very own; no one is stopping you. Oh — I forgot, you aren’t “unabashedly self-promoting, -aggrandizing, -referring, etc.” You modest little flower, you.